What Happens in Vegas Stays on TripAdvisor? A Theory and Technique to Understand Narrativity in Consumer Reviews

Abstract

Many consumers base their purchase decisions on online consumer reviews. An overlooked feature of these texts is their narrativity: the extent to which they tell a story. The authors construct a new theory of narrativity to link the narrative content and discourse of consumer reviews to consumer behavior. They also develop from scratch a computerized technique that reliably determines the degree of narrativity of 190,461 verbatim, online consumer reviews and validate the automated text analysis with two controlled experiments. More transporting (i.e., engaging) and persuasive reviews have better developed characters and events as well as more emotionally changing genres and dramatic event orders. This interdisciplinary, multimethod research should help future researchers (1) predict how narrativity affects consumers' narrative transportation and persuasion, (2) measure the narrativity of large digital corpora of textual data, and (3) understand how this important linguistic feature varies along a continuum.

How online word‐of‐mouth impacts receivers

“…Review length is usually operationalized by word or character count. Longer reviews can increase perceived review helpfulness and sales (e.g., Fresneda & Gefen, ; Ghose et al, ; Van Laer, Edson Escalas, Ludwig, & van den Hende, ; Yin, Bond, & Zhang, ; Yin et al, ), and this relationship is stronger for search and utilitarian goods than experience goods (Mudambi & Schuff, ; Pan & Zhang, ). These positive effects likely arise because longer reviews provide more information, enabling receivers to infer product outcomes, make attributions about causes, and predict their likelihood of satisfaction.…”

“…WOM messages may contain narratives, which present characters who think and feel, and incorporate temporal and relational elements (Hamby, Daniloski, & Brinberg, ; Van Laer et al, ). Various linguistic components of a review (e.g., causation words, emotion words) can be used to measure its degree of narrative content and discourse (e.g., whether its sentiment follows a comedic or tragic arc; Van Laer et al, ). Reviews that contain more narrative elements increase perceived review helpfulness, which increases product evaluations and purchase intentions (Hamby et al, ; Van Laer et al, ).…”

“…Various linguistic components of a review (e.g., causation words, emotion words) can be used to measure its degree of narrative content and discourse (e.g., whether its sentiment follows a comedic or tragic arc; Van Laer et al, ). Reviews that contain more narrative elements increase perceived review helpfulness, which increases product evaluations and purchase intentions (Hamby et al, ; Van Laer et al, ). Narrative reviews may send both product and player signals: more narrative reviews transport receivers into the story (Van Laer et al, ; Vásquez, ) and prompt them to reflect on it (Hamby et al, ), leading to positive inferences about the message's (and sender's) credibility and informativeness (Hamby et al, ), and allowing them to better predict their likelihood of product satisfaction.…”

“…Little work has simultaneously considered the effects of more than one type of linguistic content—yet exploring the relationships between multiple word categories and different parts of speech is a critical component of building a comprehensive picture of how content impacts receivers. To make this task more manageable, researchers could use various text analysis tools (Berger et al, ; Humphreys & Wang, ; Rocklage et al, ) and rely on broader linguistic frameworks (Pogacar, Shrum, & Lowery, ) or theories (e.g., narrative; Van Laer et al, ) to provide insight into how different aspects of language might combine, and which constellations of words might be impactful.…”

Need for narrative

“…Consumer psychologists maintain that genre can affect narrative transportation (Gergen & Gergen, 1988;Van Laer et al, 2014;Van Laer, Escalas, Ludwig, & van den Hende, 2017). McCloskey (1994) underscores crescendos' transporting effect as necessary to storytellers' peroration.…”